Donald Trump’s recent comment about needing “some sort of punishment” for women who have abortions threw many in the anti-choice movement into damage control mode. But some anti-choice activists have been cheering Trump on, including, not exactly surprisingly, radical Colorado pastor Kevin Swanson, who said on his radio program today that abortion should be considered “a criminal action” by a woman.
Swanson, who a few months ago hosted Trump’s main Republican presidential rival, Sen. Ted Cruz, at a campaign forum in Iowa, explained that the principle of lex talionis, or “an eye for an eye,” means that women who have abortions should indeed be prosecuted.
“The answer to this,” he said, “is the lex talionis does bring out that if a hazardous condition is created such that a child would be likely to die, whether in the womb or outside of the womb, there ought to be some level of prosecution going on. In that case, it may be just a fine or a prison sentence of some sort. But the principle of the matter is that it’s a criminal action to kill a child, to murder a child, it ought to be a criminal action. And, now, there ought to be, I believe, some leeway as to what sort of prosecution, what sort of sentence might be used in that case.”
He added, however, that “the culpability of the woman might be mitigated somewhat” by the “many forces around her that are pressing her towards this decision.”
“Yes, in many cases, it’s the abortionist, it’s the boyfriend, it’s the mother, it’s the father, it’s — somebody is pressing that woman to kill her child,” he said. “That ought to be brought into the conversation.”
He added that “organizations like Planned Parenthood” are “extremely culpable” when it comes to abortion.
“In other words,” he said, “we need to take care of those that are most culpable first and foremost, and that would be the abortionists and the pro-abortion organizations that engage in as much of the propaganda that we’ve seen in the public schools and elsewhere. So if we deal with it at that level first, we won’t have to deal with it at the level of the average and ordinary woman who has to deal with the decision.”
